This English-language lecture and discussion is part of a HHU master seminar in African women writers and feminist thought. The lecture is open to the public. Recommended preparatory reading: Sindiwe Magona, Mother to Mother.

Dr. Mandisa Mbali is a senior lecturer in historical studies at the University of Cape Town. Her research and teaching sits in the intersecting fields of historical epistemology and social anthropology and she specialises in questions around the politics of health, AIDS activism and gender, race and class in South Africa.

In South Africa, the women’s movement has been deeply fractured by racial divisions. In the post-apartheid era, motherhood has remained an important site of black feminist struggle. Mandisa Mbali will give a short contextual overview and then address literary fiction and AIDS activism, two fields in which black women’s voices trouble patriarchal notions of motherhood and acknowledge the inequitable ‘work of motherhood’: Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother contains reflections on dominant normative concepts of motherhood as silencing in relation to the structural inequalities which shape black women’s lives. Similarly, black feminist AIDS activists have recently come to critique idealised woman-as-mother approaches to preventive advocacy, according to which HIV-positive women bore the sole symbolic burden of being stigmatised as disease vectors, only valued in terms of the extent to which they could have healthy babies. Literature and activism can project a more comprehensive, in the best case policy-shaping understanding of women’s sexuality and role.